Devonne Brown

Image generated with AI.

“I hate this tradition. It’s dumb. Why can’t we be like normal families and roast ducks and wear stupid hats?” said Janice. She was eighteen and didn’t want to write a sentence on her scroll this year. 

“Write what you feel. If you think it’s a stupid tradition, write about it being a stupid tradition. All you have to do is write one true sentence about your life on your parchment and put it away until next year. After fifty years, you get to read all that you’ve written. It speaks volumes about your life and where you were in your psyche when you wrote it,” said Lucille. 

“That’s why I don’t want to do it. Give me a drink and a sparkler. I want to celebrate New Years normal,” Janice was angry. She truly didn’t want to do the sentence thing. She didn’t want to bare her soul on parchment. Even a nonsense sentence would speak volumes. She thought it was the dumbest idea she’d ever heard. Why everybody in the family was so into it she had no idea. 

This year, her aunt Clementine was two sentences away from finishing her scroll, forty-eight sentences, but died in June. Her parchment would never be complete. There it was in the box. Nobody had ever thought about unfinished scrolls. What would they do with those? What kind of tradition would they attach to those? “You gonna read this out loud or be respectful of the dead and let it be? I’d want mine to be kept private, Lucille.” said Janice. She held Clementine’s scroll protectively. 

“Just write your sentence, Janice,” said Lucille. “This is supposed to be a fun thing. Everyone else is doing it. Why are you making such a fuss?” Lucille was in a snit now.

Janice kept Clementine’s scroll close to her own. “I’ve been doing this for a lot of years, and I don’t want to be a part of it anymore. This has been a bad year. Last year was a bad year. I hate this tradition. I don’t want to immortalize my lies anymore, and you don’t get to read Clementines. She was my closest aunt, you can’t have it,” Janice had spoken. 

Janice took her scroll and Clementine’s too and left the party. In the sanctuary of her own living room, she unfurled Clementine’s parchment. In neat block letters, numbered one through forty-eight, it said, “I don’t know what to write,” over and over again. Janice laughed. She unfurled her own parchment, numbered one through ten, it said, “I don’t know what to write.” 

No wonder she loved Clementine so much.